So fragmentary and confused are the events of that day that a cubist literature were necessary to convey the impressions left upon me.  I had something of the feeling of a recruit who for the first time is taking part in a brilliant and complicated manoeuvre.  Tom and Susan Peters flit across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the Ewanses,—­all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton was “best man,” looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat:  and his manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured tolerance toward a folly none but he might escape.

“If you must do it, Hughie, I suppose you must,” he had said to me.  “I’ll see you through, of course.  But don’t blame me afterwards.”

Maude was a little afraid of him....

I dressed at George’s; then, like one of those bewildering shifts of a cinematograph, comes the scene in church, the glimpse of my mother’s wistful face in the front pew; and I found myself in front of the austere Mr. Doddridge standing beside Maude—­or rather beside a woman I tried hard to believe was Maude—­so veiled and generally encased was she.  I was thinking of this all the time I was mechanically answering Mr. Doddridge, and even when the wedding march burst forth and I led her out of the church.  It was as though they had done their best to disguise her, to put our union on the other-worldly plane that was deemed to be its only justification, to neutralize her sex at the very moment it should have been most enhanced.  Well, they succeeded.  If I had not been as conventional as the rest, I should have preferred to have run away with her in the lavender dress she wore when I first proposed to her.  It was only when we had got into the carriage and started for the house and she turned to me her face from which the veil had been thrown back that I realized what a sublime meaning it all had for her.  Her eyes were wet.  Once more I was acutely conscious of my inability to feel deeply at supreme moments.  For months I had looked forward with anticipation and impatience to my wedding-day.

I kissed her gently.  But I felt as though she had gone to heaven, and that the face I beheld enshrouded were merely her effigy.  Commonplace words were inappropriate, yet it was to these I resorted.

“Well—­it wasn’t so bad after all!  Was it?”

She smiled at me.

“You don’t want to take it back?”

She shook her head.

“I think it was a beautiful wedding, Hugh.  I’m so glad we had a good day."...

She seemed shy, at once very near and very remote.  I held her hand awkwardly until the carriage stopped.

A little later we were standing in a corner of the parlour, the atmosphere of which was heavy with the scent of flowers, submitting to the onslaught of relatives.  Then came the wedding breakfast:  croquettes, champagne, chicken salad, ice-cream, the wedding-cake, speeches and more kisses....  I remember Tom Peters holding on to both my hands.